TED | 极点往返 - 我生命中最艰苦的105天

中文讲稿

00:12

TED是智慧的绿洲，我有幸今晚站在这儿，以一位行走在天寒地冻区域的探险专家的身份发言。成年后，我把大部分时间用于带领极地探险，上个月，我和队友拉卡·赫皮尼尔，完成了有生以来最雄心勃勃的探险。我差不多像是从那无人区四个月的骂骂咧咧生活中，直接被传送到了演说现场。因此你大概能注意到，我还没缓过劲儿来。其中一个有意思的后遗症，就是我的短期记忆真的非常短，所以我不得不做记些笔记，来让剩下的17分钟，不会充斥咒骂和嘟哝。这是我第一次谈论这次探险，虽然我们没有做出基因测序，或是建太空望远镜这样的贡献,但这次探险里，我们依然竭尽所能，达成了人类前所未有的目标。而我也希望你们能从中获得些启示。

01:24

这是一次南极洲探险，全世界最冷，风最大，最干燥，海拔最高的大洲。那是个不可思议的，巨大的地方。它的面积是澳大利亚版图的两倍，等同于中国和印度版图面积的总和。

01:42

说句题外话，前些天我遇上了个有趣现象，宇航员克里斯·哈菲尔德几年前在TED演讲时应该也经历过。我遇上了诸如此类的对话：“天啊，南极，棒极了！”，“我和老公在南极庆祝了结婚纪念日诶！”或是“哦，真炫，你去那儿参加马拉松了？”

02:06

我们的旅程，它实际路程约69个全程马拉松。共计105天，全程徒步从南极洲海岸行至极点再返回，共计1800英里。期间，我们打破了人类最长人力极圈旅程的记录-比它多了400多英里。（掌声）对来自湾区的各位而言，这个距离差不多是从这儿走到旧金山，再走回这里。这真是个漫长旅程。我在《马拉西亚经济洞察报》中，看到关于此行最简洁的概述。“两个探险家刚完成了上回尝试者全军覆没的一次极地探险。”

02:58

克里斯·哈菲尔德痛陈了其中的恐惧以及成功与幸存的几率。在我们之前尝试过这旅行的9人中，没有人是成功到达极点后又走回来的，有五人死于途中。

03:16

这位是罗伯特·法尔考·斯科特，他带队作了最后的尝试。斯科特和竞争者欧内斯特·沙克尔顿爵士，在十多年里，都力争成为第一个抵达南极点、第一个画出南极内陆地图的人。那时我们对那片土地知之甚少，-甚至不及月球表面。因为我们能从望远镜看到月球，而南极洲在一个世纪前大部分地方都没地图。

03:44

你们中有人也许听过这故事，1910年，斯科特对新大陆作了他最后一次探险，带着胸中的万丈豪情。他人力充足。在种马，狗，汽动机，足量食物及燃油的条件下，斯科特的五人小队将会到达极点，然后，他们掉头返回，用双脚丈量海岸。1912年一月，斯科特和他的五人小分队到达了南极点。但不巧，他们发现由挪威人罗尔德·阿蒙森领头的小队已然领先。斯科特及队员们徒步前行。然而，已经过了一个世纪，漫漫旅途无果而终。斯科特的五人小分队，死于归途。过去十年来，我不断自问：为何？何以它仍为人类巅峰？斯科特的团队共计步行1600英里。前无古人，后无来者。这是人类耐力顶峰，人们共同努力的结晶。人类极限运动的巅峰。况且，四目所及，天寒地坼。就好比马拉松记录，自1912年以来都不曾被打破似的。好奇，混杂着第六感，随风而来。固执，可能还有些许傲慢，让我跃跃欲试。

05:07

不同于斯科特，我们相伴二人行。自去年10月，我们从南极洲海岸出发，荷重前行。即斯科特所谓的“人拖”。我刚才说，这就像从这儿到旧金山的往返路程。实际上，还要再拖个比美式橄榄球运动员稍微重点的东西。我们的行李大约200公斤重或者说，刚开始，每人负荷是440磅。这是斯科特团队中最瘦弱的种马拉的货物重量。起先，我们平均一小时行进0.5英里，也许，超过一世纪，人们惶而畏之因，是真没有这么傻的人会尝试啊。虽然我们不能像爱德华时代的探索家那样，我们不是在为山命名或是标出任何未知的峡谷但我想我们踏入了一种人性的新区域。诚然，如果未来，我们得知人在赌咒时大脑一块区域会被激活，对我来说，这没什么好惊讶的。

06:13

你们己经知道美国人平均花90%在室内，我们会几乎四个月不出门。我们当然也看不到日落。极点是24小时极昼，生存条件恶劣。在105天里，我换了3次内衣我和队友共享30平方英尺的空间。确实我们有斯科特团队想都想不到的技术而且我们每晚都会通过笔记本电脑及简易制作的卫星信号转换器发博客来证明我们还活着。这一切都是太阳能驱动的，在帐篷上，我们有可灵活移动的摄像头。写下经历对我来说也很重要。孩提时，我被冒险和探索小说鼓舞了我想，这周，我们已经看到叙述故事的重要性及其力量。

07:07

综上所述，我们有21世纪的现代化设备但现实是，斯科特团队面临的挑战于我们而言，同样存在：天气恶劣，以及雪橇及雪之间大量的摩擦产生的斯科特称之为“滑动”的作用力。风力最低也是70mps伸手不见五指这就是所谓的白茫茫一片。我们旅程大多数时候都是这样的。我们穿行在世界上最大，也是最危险的冰川之一，比尔德莫尔冰川之上。它长达110米，表层大部分由一种叫蓝冰的物质覆盖。你们可以看到，它是美丽却难以使车轮前行的光滑冰川它由数以千计的溶洞覆盖最深处可达200英尺深。飞机无法着陆，所以我们的生命岌岌可危，我们生还的几率近乎为零。

08:00

除了有一天因为天气状况太糟糕而停止行进再去南极点的路上在徒步走了61天后我要说，这确实难于上青天。这里有个永久的美国基地，-在南极点的阿姆森-斯科特极点考察站。那儿有停机坪厨房，热水浴。有邮局，游轮，以及两倍于一个电影院的篮球场。所以，这些天略有不同也有成堆的垃圾。我觉得人类一年365天只靠汉堡，热水和影院就能生活简直不可思议。但这似乎确实产生了许多空纸板盒。你可以看到在这张照片的左面，有好几平方的垃圾等着从南极点拖走。但南极也有个极点，我们没有技术支持走最困难的路线共计900英里而且负重超过史上任何一位考察队员。而如果我们止步于此，折返离开，去做更有意义的事那我的演讲也就到此为止了。也就不足为奇。

09:10

但如果你有优秀的团队，适宜的工具险情的科技而且，自信满满意志坚定那一切险阻当不在话下。

09:24

但那时，我们四周晃了会儿，然后一切变得有趣起来了。在亚特兰地高地，超过10000英尺的地方，寒风凛冽天寒地燥，我们精疲力竭。我们翻阅了35座冰川但这只是路途一半。但我们肯定有安全措施，我们有雪上飞机和卫星电话。以及24小时时刻待命的后援团，斯科特可没有这些安全措施。但从制高点来看，安全措施并未使我们的生活更好它确实际上使东西四分五裂。让我们无限接近人类极限。并且，它是一种细致的折磨方式日复一日，将你拖到饥饿的零界点，使你精疲力竭。-而且你是拉着一雪橇满满的食物。

10:12

数年来，我一直以资助顾问的身份撰写关于推动人类极限的油腔滑调的文章。实际上，它确实是个令人畏惧的领域。在去南极前，我们给头顶吹了2周的风，让我们反应迟钝。结果，好几天我们食欲减半。我们为这次行程在雪橇中准备了足量食物所以我们通过减少我们的卡路里摄入量至一半来节省食物结果，我们身体机能出现问题我们日复一日，血糖指数不断降低但对严寒的适应程度却越发的好了。在一个晚上，Tarka拍了这张我的照片-就在我近乎因为低温昏过去时。我们身体都反复经历低温，这之前从未有过。这让人颤抖。就像你们可能会想，我也这么想过，你是不会退缩的人你会继续探索低温并不会改变你选择。你变得行为无法自主，像醉汉一样。你变得又笨又可怜。我记得，我当时只想躺下来。然后退出。这是极为真切的感受。认输的想法真的令我震惊不已。

11:32

然后我们食物消耗殆尽，离我们倚赖的第一仓库还有46英里远我们拿出10样食物，烧食物与汽油准备返程燃油是为炊具准备的这样你可以把雪变成水。我不得不呼叫供应飞机这是带着可以助我们越过那道坎的8天食物的雪上飞机。他们用了12小时从亚特兰地的另一头飞到我们这边。

12:03

呼叫那趟飞机是我人生中最艰难的决定之一。我听上去就像无助的站在那儿朝旷野呼唤的人，在过去三周，我已增重30磅，在那样的饥饿状态下导致了另一个有意思的后遗症-我一直在找我能找到的所有酒店自助餐（但我们确实饿得不行，身体状况极其糟糕，我并不后悔呼叫了那趟飞机，因为我还活着，站在这儿记述所有细节，诉说着这个故事。但是获得那样的额外援助，绝不是计划的一部分。这也是我的良心仍旧苦苦挣扎的地方。这是我有生以来最大的梦想它近乎完美。

12:48

再回海岸的路上我们的破冰撬-他们是我们在这个蓝色冰川上行进的砥柱-坏掉了。-就在本德穆尔冰川制高点。在这些难以攀岩的蓝冰上，我们还有100英里要走下去。几乎每小时，他们就要修一下。给你们个大体上的概念吧这就像是从本德穆尔冰川顶上向下看。你可以在曼哈顿的间隙瞭望到整个视野。霍普山与凯芙琳山间隔20英里。在亚特兰地，我从未感到自己如此渺小。当我们走到冰川口时发现新下的雪已经覆盖了岩洞的裂口。一位沙克雷顿成员描述了走过这层冰川的感觉，就像走过铁路表面一样。我己经记不得有多少次，我们在雪上放一块雪橇或木板来看有没有洞偶尔，我们会掉进我们的窝但感谢上帝，没有更深了。

13:48

五周前，也就是105天后，我们越过了终点线。在亚特兰地新西兰的罗斯群岛海岸线。你可以看到在前边的冰以及后边风化的岩石。在我们后面，有一条长达1800英里未被破坏的冰线。我们曾徒步走完了有史以来最长的极圈旅程这我已梦想了几十年了。

14:15

回首往事我依然支持我数年来所说的有关目标，决心，及自信的重要性。但我也承认我并未充分考虑当你完成所有预定目标时会发生的事这些目标是你成人生活中为之贡献一生的现实就是，我还在想要阐明它。我也说过，几乎没有迹象表明我离开过。我增重了30磅我有了些淡淡的可能现在已消失的小红斑鼻子上，脸颊上各一处，都是被护目镜压出来的。但内里，我改头换面了。如果要我诚实到来，亚特兰地如此深入的挑战我并改变了我这是不能用言语描述的变化。我仍在竭力重组我的想法我站在这儿讲这个故事的原因就是，为了证明我们都能完成伟大的事情。通过雄心，通过激情，通过傲慢，固执通过拒绝离开如果你梦想的事足够艰难，正如斯蒂芬说过的，它确然能实现。但我也站在这儿告诉你们，你们应当知道的是，路途远必目的地重要有据可循我越靠近我的终点线罗斯群岛粗陋的海岸我越发开始意识到这次很长，很难的徒步带给我的最大教训，那就是对我们人类来说幸福不是终点线我们许多人所梦想的完美也许遥不可及。如果我们不能在此时，此地，此行中感到知足，承认我们继承的混乱与无序打开的屋顶完成一半的清单也许下次会更好的想法那我们可能永远感受不到它。

16:36

许多人曾问过我，接下来呢？现在，我很高兴刚从旅馆自助餐后遗症中恢复过来但就像鲍勃·霍普期望的我感到很卑微。但我认为我有强大的人格来与他斗争。

16:57

谢谢。

The End

英文讲稿

00:12

So in the oasis of intelligentsia that is TED, I stand here before you this evening as an expert in dragging heavy stuff around cold places. I've been leading polar expeditions for most of my adult life, and last month, my teammate Tarka L'Herpiniere and I finished the most ambitious expedition I've ever attempted. In fact, it feels like I've been transported straight here from four months in the middle of nowhere, mostly grunting and swearing, straight to the TED stage. So you can imagine that's a transition that hasn't been entirely seamless. One of the interesting side effects seems to be that my short-term memory is entirely shot. So I've had to write some notes to avoid too much grunting and swearing in the next 17 minutes. This is the first talk I've given about this expedition, and while we weren't sequencing genomes or building space telescopes, this is a story about giving everything we had to achieve something that hadn't been done before. So I hope in that you might find some food for thought. 

01:24

It was a journey, an expedition in Antarctica, the coldest, windiest, driest and highest altitude continent on Earth. It's a fascinating place. It's a huge place. It's twice the size of Australia, a continent that is the same size as China and India put together. 

01:42

As an aside, I have experienced  an interesting phenomenon in the last few days, something that I expect Chris Hadfield may get at TED in a few years' time, conversations that go something like this: "Oh, Antarctica. Awesome. My husband and I did Antarctica with Lindblad for our anniversary." Or, "Oh cool, did you go there for the marathon?"

02:06

Our journey was, in fact, 69 marathons back to back in 105 days, an 1,800-mile round trip on foot from the coast of Antarctica to the South Pole and back again. In the process, we broke the record  for the longest human-powered polar journey in history by more than 400 miles. (Applause) For those of you from the Bay Area, it was the same as walking from here to San Francisco, then turning around and walking back again. So as camping trips go, it was a long one, and one I've seen summarized most succinctly here on the hallowed pages of Business Insider Malaysia. ["Two Explorers Just Completed A Polar Expedition That Killed Everyone The Last Time It Was Attempted"] 

02:58

Chris Hadfield talked so eloquently about fear and about the odds of success, and indeed the odds of survival. Of the nine people in history that had attempted this journey before us, none had made it to the pole and back, and five had died in the process. 

03:16

This is Captain Robert Falcon Scott. He led the last team to attempt this expedition. Scott and his rival Sir Ernest Shackleton, over the space of a decade, both led expeditions battling to become the first to reach the South Pole, to chart and map the interior of Antarctica, a place we knew less about, at the time, than the surface of the moon, because we could see the moon through telescopes. Antarctica was, for the most part, a century ago, uncharted. 

03:44

Some of you may know the story. Scott's last expedition, the Terra Nova Expedition in 1910, started as a giant siege-style approach. He had a big team using ponies, using dogs, using petrol-driven tractors, dropping multiple, pre-positioned depots of food and fuel through which Scott's final team of five would travel to the Pole, where they would turn around and ski back to the coast again on foot. Scott and his final team of five arrived at the South Pole in January 1912 to find they had been beaten to it by a Norwegian team led by Roald Amundsen, who rode on dogsled. Scott's team ended up on foot. And for more than a century this journey has remained unfinished. Scott's team of five died on the return journey. And for the last decade, I've been asking myself why that is. How come this has remained the high-water mark? Scott's team covered 1,600 miles on foot. No one's come close to that ever since. So this is the high-water mark of human endurance, human endeavor, human athletic achievement in arguably the harshest climate on Earth. It was as if the marathon record has remained unbroken since 1912. And of course some strange and predictable combination of curiosity, stubbornness, and probably hubris led me to thinking I might be the man to try to finish the job. 

05:07

Unlike Scott's expedition, there were just two of us, and we set off from the coast of Antarctica in October last year, dragging everything ourselves, a process Scott called "man-hauling." When I say it was like walking from here to San Francisco and back, I actually mean it was like dragging something that weighs a shade more than the heaviest ever NFL player. Our sledges weighed 200 kilos, or 440 pounds each at the start, the same weights that the weakest of Scott's ponies pulled. Early on, we averaged 0.5 miles per hour. Perhaps the reason no one had attempted this journey until now, in more than a century, was that no one had been quite stupid enough to try. And while I can't claim we were exploring in the genuine Edwardian sense of the word — we weren't naming any mountains or mapping any uncharted valleys — I think we were stepping into uncharted territory in a human sense. Certainly, if in the future we learn there is an area of the human brain that lights up when one curses oneself, I won't be at all surprised. 

06:13

You've heard that the average American spends 90 percent of their time indoors. We didn't go indoors for nearly four months. We didn't see a sunset either. It was 24-hour daylight. Living conditions were quite spartan. I changed my underwear three times in 105 days and Tarka and I shared 30 square feet on the canvas. Though we did have some technology that Scott could never have imagined. And we blogged live every evening from the tent via a laptop and a custom-made satellite transmitter, all of which were solar-powered: we had a flexible photovoltaic panel over the tent. And the writing was important to me. As a kid, I was inspired by the literature of adventure and exploration, and I think we've all seen here this week the importance and the power of storytelling. 

07:07

So we had some 21st-century gear, but the reality is that the challenges that Scott faced were the same that we faced: those of the weather and of what Scott called glide, the amount of friction between the sledges and the snow. The lowest wind chill we experienced was in the -70s, and we had zero visibility, what's called white-out, for much of our journey. We traveled up and down one of the largest and most dangerous glaciers in the world, the Beardmore glacier. It's 110 miles long; most of its surface is what's called blue ice. You can see it's a beautiful, shimmering steel-hard blue surface covered with thousands and thousands of crevasses, these deep cracks in the glacial ice up to 200 feet deep. Planes can't land here, so we were at the most risk, technically, when we had the slimmest chance of being rescued. 

08:00

We got to the South Pole after 61 days on foot, with one day off for bad weather, and I'm sad to say, it was something of an anticlimax. There's a permanent American base, the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station at the South Pole. They have an airstrip, they have a canteen, they have hot showers, they have a post office, a tourist shop,  a basketball court that doubles as a movie theater. So it's a bit different these days, and there are also acres of junk. I think it's a marvelous thing  that humans can exist 365 days of the year with hamburgers and hot showers and movie theaters, but it does seem to produce a lot of empty cardboard boxes. You can see on the left of this photograph, several square acres of junk waiting to be flown out from the South Pole. But there is also a pole at the South Pole, and we got there on foot, unassisted, unsupported, by the hardest route, 900 miles in record time, dragging more weight than anyone in history. And if we'd stopped there and flown home, which would have been the eminently sensible thing to do, then my talk would end here and it would end something like this. 

09:10

If you have the right team around you, the right tools, the right technology, and if you have enough self-belief and enough determination, then anything is possible. 

09:24

But then we turned around, and this is where things get interesting. High on the Antarctic plateau, over 10,000 feet, it's very windy, very cold, very dry, we were exhausted. We'd covered 35 marathons, we were only halfway, and we had a safety net, of course, of ski planes and satellite phones and live, 24-hour tracking beacons that didn't exist for Scott, but in hindsight, rather than making our lives easier, the safety net actually allowed us to cut things very fine indeed, to sail very close to our absolute limits as human beings. And it is an exquisite form of torture to exhaust yourself to the point of starvation day after day while dragging a sledge full of food. 

10:12

For years, I'd been writing glib lines in sponsorship proposals about pushing the limits of human endurance, but in reality, that was a very frightening place to be indeed. We had, before we'd got to the Pole, two weeks of almost permanent headwind, which slowed us down. As a result, we'd had several days of eating half rations. We had a finite amount of food in the sledges to make this journey, so we were trying to string that out by reducing our intake to half the calories we should have been eating. As a result, we both became increasingly hypoglycemic — we had low blood sugar levels day after day — and increasingly susceptible to the extreme cold. Tarka took this photo of me one evening after I'd nearly passed out with hypothermia. We both had repeated bouts of hypothermia, something I hadn't experienced before, and it was very humbling indeed. As much as you might like to think, as I do, that you're the kind of person who doesn't quit, that you'll go down swinging, hypothermia doesn't leave you much choice. You become utterly incapacitated. It's like being a drunk toddler. You become pathetic. I remember just wanting to lie down and quit. It was a peculiar, peculiar feeling, and a real surprise to me to be debilitated to that degree. 

11:32

And then we ran out of food completely, 46 miles short of the first of the depots that we'd laid on our outward journey. We'd laid 10 depots of food, literally burying food and fuel, for our return journey — the fuel was for a cooker so you could melt snow to get water — and I was forced to make the decision to call for a resupply flight, a ski plane carrying eight days of food to tide us over that gap. They took 12 hours to reach us from the other side of Antarctica. 

12:03

Calling for that plane was one of the toughest decisions of my life. And I sound like a bit of a fraud standing here now with a sort of belly. I've put on 30 pounds in the last three weeks. Being that hungry has left an interesting mental scar, which is that I've been hoovering up every hotel buffet that I can find. (Laughter) But we were genuinely quite hungry, and in quite a bad way. I don't regret calling for that plane for a second, because I'm still standing here alive, with all digits intact, telling this story. But getting external assistance like that was never part of the plan, and it's something my ego is still struggling with. This was the biggest dream I've ever had, and it was so nearly perfect. 

12:48

On the way back down to the coast, our crampons — they're the spikes on our boots that we have for traveling over this blue ice on the glacier — broke on the top of the Beardmore. We still had 100 miles to go downhill on very slippery rock-hard blue ice. They needed repairing almost every hour. To give you an idea of scale, this is looking down towards the mouth of the Beardmore Glacier. You could fit the entirety of Manhattan in the gap on the horizon. That's 20 miles between Mount Hope and Mount Kiffin. I've never felt as small as I did in Antarctica. When we got down to the mouth of the glacier, we found fresh snow had obscured the dozens of deep crevasses. One of Shackleton's men described crossing this sort of terrain as like walking over the glass roof of a railway station. We fell through more times than I can remember, usually just putting a ski or a boot through the snow. Occasionally we went in all the way up to our armpits, but thankfully never deeper than that. 

13:48

And less than five weeks ago, after 105 days, we crossed this oddly inauspicious finish line, the coast of Ross Island on the New Zealand side of Antarctica. You can see the ice in the foreground and the sort of rubbly rock behind that. Behind us lay an unbroken ski trail of nearly 1,800 miles. We'd made the longest ever polar journey on foot, something I'd been dreaming of doing for a decade. 

14:15

And looking back, I still stand by all the things I've been saying for years about the importance of goals and determination and self-belief, but I'll also admit that I hadn't given much thought to what happens when you reach the all-consuming goal that you've dedicated most of your adult life to, and the reality is that I'm still figuring that bit out. As I said, there are very few superficial signs that I've been away. I've put on 30 pounds. I've got some very faint, probably covered in makeup now, frostbite scars. I've got one on my nose, one on each cheek, from where the goggles are, but inside I am a very different person indeed. If I'm honest, Antarctica challenged me and humbled me so deeply that I'm not sure I'll ever be able to put it into words. I'm still struggling to piece together my thoughts. That I'm standing here telling this story is proof that we all can accomplish great things, through ambition, through passion, through sheer stubbornness, by refusing to quit, that if you dream something hard enough, as Sting said, it does indeed come to pass. But I'm also standing here saying, you know what, that cliche about the journey being more important than the destination? There's something in that. The closer I got to my finish line, that rubbly, rocky coast of Ross Island, the more I started to realize that the biggest lesson that this very long, very hard walk might be teaching me is that happiness is not a finish line, that for us humans, the perfection that so many of us seem to dream of might not ever be truly attainable, and that if we can't feel content here, today, now, on our journeys amidst the mess and the striving that we all inhabit, the open loops, the half-finished to-do lists, the could-do-better-next-times, then we might never feel it. 

16:36

A lot of people have asked me, what next? Right now, I am very happy just recovering and in front of hotel buffets. But as Bob Hope put it, I feel very humble, but I think I have the strength of character to fight it. 

16:57

Thank you. 

The End